Today, we drove from Zumaia to Bordeaux, another long-ish day of around 7 hours.
I didn’t shoot anything along the way, as we just wanted to get there and get settled so we could hit the streets of Bordeaux. Our Air B’n’B turned out to be the dodgiest of them all (I guess one of them had to earn that honour, right?). But, we’re not here for the accommodation, we’re here for the sights! We dumped our bags, and jumped on a bus into town.
There, we proceeded to walk up, down and all around in 35 degree heat, which was a bit of a shock after the preceding week of mid-20 degree days. Bordeaux cathedral was suitably impressive, but to be honest, after 17 days, I’m kinda getting to a point of having seen enough churches. I had been warned of this before the trip; y my wife and by others. “The ABC tour of Europe? Another Bloody Church!”. Starting to understand that now. But, you have to give it to them; they ARE impressive buildings. But when you consider the corruption, coercion and torture that helped erect them, that sort of takes the gloss off the experience a little.
In the evening, we went and hung around out the front of the Place de la Bourse, near Le Miroir d’eau (the water mirror). This large flat expanse of concrete is riddled with jets which, every 20 minutes, emit a fine mist for a few minutes. At this time of year, in this heat, you can imagine how popular a location this is. The kids love it, and the adults are glad for the cooling effect of the water, as well. We grabbed a couple of selfies, had a camera-wielding stranger take one of the two of us, then hung around waiting for the sun to go down.
My aim was to shoot a long exposure with a 10 stop filter, thinking that if most of the people were moving (as most of them were), then I SHOULD end up with an image with no people evident. For the most part, I got that image, although you can see a couple of ‘ghosts’ from people who didn’t move much during my 2 minute exposure. And yes, the sky is slightly blown out. Ideally, I would have hung around for another hour for the sky to darken further, but it was 21:30 when I shot this, and we’ve got another big day of driving and sightseeing tomorrow. Oh well, at least I got a half decent image of it!
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